Ian Talbot: Retrospective – Bloody Finger : Fingering The Edge

Chapter IX of the ongoing series Ian Talbot : Retrospective by British fine art photographer Ian Talbot.

Bloody Finger : Fingering The Edge

© Ian Talbot

“And the priest shall dip his finger in the blood, and sprinkle of the blood seven times before the LORD, before the vail of the sanctuary.” Leviticus 4:6

Though not of the faith, I have Jewish blood in my veins passed down to me by my matrineal Jewish great grandmother. This, of course, doesn’t make me Jewish it merely means I have a some, albeit small, Jewish heritage. Neither am I strictly speaking a Christian, nevertheless it is a heritage that all of us in the West share, living in a society based on the Judaeo-Christian tradition.

Undoubtedly for some, or indeed many, concepts of ritual are an alluring part of any organised religion and encourage a sense of belonging. Also, to some extent, we all have our own small rituals which go to make up the daily practices of our personal lifestyles. Perhaps there is something in the human soul that finds comfort in such daily ritualistic practices. Maybe it’s the attraction of the familiar.

Whatever one’s personal beliefs, however, it is the undeniable case that the King James Authorised Version of the Bible represents some of the most beautiful and powerful writing in the English language. Contemporary with, and the equal of, Shakespeare.

Before I made the image here I had already decided on the title of my overall self portrait project… “Fingering The Edge”. While in my kitchen thawing out a frozen lamb’s heart I was poking about in it to ascertain whether it had fully thawed out. As soon as I saw my gorily bloody finger I knew there was an image to fit the project. Blood is such a deeply ingrained part of our self identity and the use of blood in ritual has proven irresistibly alluring for many, if not most, religious practices throughout all of human history. The Biblical quote here was found after the fact of the image itself. I thought it fitted well in this case…

If the image looks complex or deliberately lit… it isn’t. I merely held my finger up out back in flatly lit open shade and shot it hand held in my free hand with a macro lens. The overall “look” of the image is the result of some judicious post processing. I had, however, pre-visualised exactly how it would look before ever I even picked the camera up. That is the way I always work and in that respect this image was certainly no different.

Ian Talbot

Text & image © Ian Talbot

• You can see the complete set at Ian Talbot’s website : Fingering The Edge : Identikit

Next week
Stubborn Breasts : Words

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Herbert Ponting “The Journey South” – Getty Images Gallery, London

Getty Images Gallery, London

Herbert Ponting – “The Journey South”
Photographic exhibition marks centenary of Scott’s voyage to South Pole
4th February – 6th March

Marking the centenary of Scott’s epic voyage to the South Pole, the Getty Images Gallery, in association with the Scott Polar Research Institute, is presenting a new photographic exhibition which will feature the work of Herbert Ponting, the photographer who accompanied the expedition.

Herbert Ponting

H,G Ponting, Captain Scott+s Antarctic Expedition 1910 – 1912, 7th January, 1911.
Beautiful ice reflections in the water with the Terra Nova ship in the background, “Death of an iceberg”
(Photo by Popperfoto/Getty Images)
© All rights reserved

Herbert Ponting’s beautiful and graphic photographs record the conditions faced by Robert Falcon Scott’s team of men before their final push to the pole and before tragedy ultimately struck in 1912. Ponting also captured the stark beauty of Antarctica 100 years ago, in a series of landscape shots which remain iconic and timeless to this day.

The collection provides a stirring testament to the heroism and bravery of all involved and perfectly encapsulates the spirit of adventure and discovery that marked the epic journey. The glass plate negatives from which these images are taken are preserved in the Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge. This part of the collection is represented by Getty Images.

Herbert Ponting was a self-taught photographer who spent time travelling through the Far East, photographing people and places, before joining the crew of the Terra Nova on their journey south. He recorded the difficult living conditions under which the expedition members and their animals lived and worked.

Herbert Ponting

H,G Ponting, Captain Scott+s Antarctic Expedition 1910 – 1912, 2nd December, 1911.
The ice cliffs at the end of the Barne Glacier with Mount Erebus in the background (Photo by Popperfoto/Getty Images)
© All rights reserved

Herbert Ponting

H,G Ponting, Captain Scott+s Antarctic Expedition 1911 – 1912, 5th January, 1911.
A view inside an ice grotto showing the “Terra Nova” ship in the distance as Taylor and Wright stand inside (Photo by Popperfoto/Getty Images)
© All rights reserved

Among the incredible collection of images is a photograph entitled “The Tenements”, showing the cramped bunks in Winterquarters Hut, which made up the living conditions of the team. Another image shows Evans and Crean sitting in front of shelves stacked with boxes mending their sleeping bags whilst smoking a pipe. Lieut Evans is also pictured observing Jupiter through a telescope in the middle of the night, whilst dressed in a balaclava and heavy overcoat. Herbert Ponting himself is also captured working in the dark room and posing with his cinematograph (the tripod mounted film camera that he used to record the voyage).

Ponting’s brief was to also satisfy the expedition’s sponsors and so the collection includes humorous, advert-like images of crew members consuming Heinz baked beans and Fry’s chocolate. In one image, an expedition member sits on two boxes marked ‘Heinz Baked Beans’, on the snow. He holds a can in one hand and a spoon in the other.

Herbert Ponting

H,G Ponting, Captain Scott+s Antarctic Expedition 1910 – 1912, 7th February, 1911.
A sledging party enjoy a meal of Colman’s Corn Flour, while briefly stopping for a break on their march (Photo by Popperfoto/Getty Images)
© All rights reserved

Courtesy Getty Images Gallery
Photo by Popperfoto/Getty Images
Images © All rights reserved

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Morris Museum – Paintings Down

The Morris Museum of Art, Augusta

Grand reopening with many public events from March 6–14

The Morris Museum Has Been Caught With Its Paintings Down

The Morris Museum offers free admission to all visitors, beginning Tuesday, January 26. Most of the museum’s galleries are closed while its permanent collection is being rearranged and re-hung.

The Morris Museum of Art

© The Morris Museum of Art

The Coggins Gallery, featuring Deep Sea: Drawings by William Golding, the Education Gallery, and museum store remain open.

The Morris’s grand reopening will be celebrated with many public events from March 6–14; the free admission policy will continue through Sunday, March 14.

“The Morris is completely reinstalling its renowned permanent collection, which has nearly doubled in size over the past eight years,” said Kevin Grogan, director of the Morris Museum of Art. “While, from time to time, it has been possible to introduce some newly acquired works of art into the display of the permanent collection, it has not been possible to display them all. It isn’t now, either, but greater numbers of paintings than have ever been seen before will go on display and new relationships between the rearranged works of art already on display will be explored.”

In addition to the reopening of the permanent collection galleries on the night of the Morris’s annual Gala on Friday, March 5, the museum will also open a special exhibition that night. As museum director Kevin Grogan has noted, “this year it is a very special exhibition indeed—Regional Dialect: American Scene Paintings from the John and Susan Horseman Collection, a selection of fifty-seven important works of art by forty-three of the most influential artists who worked outside the major art centers between the world wars. Though their styles differed, they shared a common commitment to the portrayal of American life—everything from Depression-era sharecroppers in the rural south to monuments of industry in the upper Midwest. We look forward to welcoming Susan and John Horseman to Augusta and to sharing their collection with a large, eagerly interested, local audience.”

For more information on the reinstallation of the permanent collection galleries or the Morris Museum, please visit www.themorris.org.

Courtesy The Morris Museum of Art
Images © The Morris Museum of Art

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El Greco – Exhibition at the Centre for Fine Arts, Brussels

Centre for Fine Arts, Brussels

El Greco
Domenikos Theotokopoulos 1900
04.02 > 09.05.2010

A fascinating overview of the painter’s artistic development via a unique selection of outstanding works

El Greco

El Greco
San Juan Evangelista / Saint John the Evangelist
Ca. 1610-1614
oil on canvas
© Toledo, Museo del Greco

Regarded today as one of the founders of the Spanish School of painting, El Greco has not, however, always enjoyed that lofty status. At the time of his death in Toledo in 1614, Europe was wildly enthusiastic about the then fashionable naturalism of the Caravaggesque style, poles apart from his own brilliant Mannerism.

El Greco’s work soon went out of fashion and remained relatively neglected down the centuries – until 1908, when the art historian Manuel Bartolomé Cossío devoted a key monograph to him. The El Greco craze took off immediately. In 1910 a discerning art collector, the Marqués de la Vega-Inclán, even established a museum in his honour in Toledo. The painter’s fame, accordingly, flourished anew, as rapidly as it had been extinguished.

In addition to outlining the key role played by those responsible for this spectacular rediscovery, the exhibition presents a fascinating overview of the painter’s artistic development via a unique selection of outstanding works, including the stunning The Disrobing of Christ and the striking The Tears of Saint Peter.

El Greco

El Greco
San Pedro en lágrimas / The Tears of Saint Peter
Ca.1587-1620
oil on canvas
© Toledo, Museo del Greco

El Greco

El Greco
La Sagrada Familia / The Holy Family with Saint Anne
Ca. 1585
oil on canvas
© Toledo, Museo de Santa Cruz depósito de la Parroquia de San Nicóla de Bari)

El Greco

El Greco
The Crucifixion
1610-1614
oil on canvas
© Toledo, Museo de Santa Cruz (Depósito de la Parroquia de San Nicolas de Bari, Toledo)

The highlight of the exhibition is El Greco’s final series of Apostles, his artistic testament: a complete, astonishingly modern series, remarkable for its totally free forms and its extraordinarily bright colours.

After this visit to the Centre for Fine Arts the series will return to the Museo de El Greco in Toledo, which it will never leave again.

Courtesy BOZART
Images © Their respective owners. All rights reserved

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• Centre for Fine Arts, Brussels

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The reaper-binder speeding up harvests – Photography

Published by Paula Bray January 31, 2010 Photo of the day.

Powerhouse Museum – Sydney

The reaper-binder speeding up harvests

The reaper-binder was designed in 1858 to cut wheat, oats or barley stalks close to the ground, bind them into sheaves with twine, then drop them onto the ground. Men following behind the machine picked up the sheaves and arranged them to dry in bundles known as stooks. When dry, the sheaves were carted away to make a haystack, and were later threshed to yield their grain, or cut for chaff to feed farm animals. This machine reduced labour costs and allowed farms to expand in size

Photography by Charles Kerry Studio
No known copyright restrictions
Post by Sandra McEwen

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